17

A cold wind howled down from MacKenzie Peak, a wind tipped with the promise of sleet or snow. A gust caught Ten halfway between the bunkhouse and the barn. He ducked his head, pulled up the collar of his shearling jacket and went in the side entrance to the barn. The room he headed for had once held harness for the Rocking Ms wagon horses. Now the room held woodworking tools – and a man who wielded them the way a wizard wields incantations against vicious demons.

The door had been locked since the evening Carla McQueen had driven off the Rocking M. After Luke had spent a long day working on the ranch, he would spend the evening and too much of the night locked inside the room, where the scream of a power saw biting into wood filled the spaces between the cries of the winter wind.

Ten was the only man who dared to disturb Luke in his lair. Lately, even Ten was thinking the matter over three or four times before he raised his fist and rattled the door on its hinges, praying that a small bit of Christmas spirit had sunk into Luke’s hard head.

"Telephone, Luke!"

"Take a message."

"I did."

"Well?"

"Cash wants to know if you’ve seen Carla."

The scream of the power saw ended abruptly.

"What?"

"You heard me."

"What makes him th – "

"How the hell should I know?" interrupted Ten. "You have questions, go ask Cash yourself. I’m damn tired of standing around in a cold barn yelling at a man who’s too blind to find his butt with both hands and a mirror the size of a full moon!"

Luke yanked opened the door and gave Ten a hard look. Ten returned it with interest.

"Give it to me again, slowly," Luke said.

"Lord, how you tempt a man," Ten muttered. "Listen up, boss. Cash McQueen is on the phone. Carla is missing. He seems to think she came here."

"On the day before Christmas?"

"Maybe she has some Christmas cookies for the hands."

Luke gave Ten a disbelieving look.

"Well, she brought us cookies a few years ago," Ten said blandly. "Maybe she decided to do it again. What other reason could she have for coming all the way out here?"

Luke stepped out of the room, slammed the door behind him, locked it, pocketed the key and stalked into the house. The kitchen phone was off the hook, waiting for him.

"Cash, what the hell is going on?"

"I hoped you could tell me. I had to overnight in New Mexico. When I got back, I found a note from Carla saying she had something to do at the Rocking M. So I called, but Ten says she isn’t around."

"When did she leave?"

"She should have been at the ranch house hours ago," Cash said bluntly.

"Maybe she decided to go somewhere else."

"She would have called and left a message on my answering machine."

Luke sensed the presence of Ten behind him. He turned and shoved the phone into his ramrod’s hand.

"Talk to Cash," Luke said curtly.

"Where are you going?"

"To check the south road for tread marks left by a baby pickup truck. If I’m not back in ten minutes, you’ll know I found tracks and kept going."

"To where?"

"September Canyon."

Muddy water shot up and out from the big pickup’s tires as Luke forded Picture Wash with unusual velocity. He told himself he was pushing so hard because he was worried about Carla being alone in the desolate canyon with a storm coming on. But he didn’t believe the rational lie. He drove like hell on fire because he was afraid she would have come and gone before he got there.

What’s the hurry, cowboy? he asked himself sardonically. Nothing has changed. Nothing can change. You can’t have both Carla and the Rocking M. Beginning and end of story.

There was no answer but the power of Luke’s hands holding the big truck to the rutted road at a speed that was just short of reckless. The turnoff into September Canyon was taken in a controlled skid that made the truck shudder.

Relief coursed through Luke when he saw Carla’s tiny pickup parked near a clump of pinon. He stopped nearby, pulled on his jacket and began walking quickly toward the overhang. The rich golden light of late afternoon slanted deeply across the canyon, heightening every small crevice in the cliffs and every tiny disturbance of the soil, making the land look as though it had been freshly created.

There was no sign that Carla had been beneath the overhang since August There were no fresh ashes in the fire ring, no new tracks near the seep’s clean water, no sleeping bag stretched out and waiting for the night that would soon descend.

Iwas right She isn’t planning to stick around.

The realization sent a cold razor of fear slicing through Luke. The feeling was irrational, yet it couldn’t be denied.

Icould so easily have missed her. Why didn’t she tell me she was coming? Why did she drive all the way out to the Rocking M and not even say hello?

No sooner had the questions formed than their answers came, echoes of a summer and a passion that never should have been, Carla’s voice calling endlessly to him, haunting even his dreams: Remember what it was like to be loved by me. Then come to me, Luke. I’ll be waiting for you, loving you.

But he hadn’t gone to her. He had gone instead to the old harness room. There he had transformed his yearning, his pain and his futile dreams into gleaming curves of wood, pieces of furniture to grace the family life he would never have.

Wind curled down through the canyon, wind cold with distance and winter, wind wailing with its passage over the empty land. The overhang took the wind, muffled it, smoothed it, transformed it into voices speaking at the edge of hearing and dreams, a man and a woman intertwined, suspended between fire and rain, their cries of fulfillment glittering in the darkness.

Abruptly Luke knew why Carla hadn’t set up camp beneath the overhang. She could no more bear its seething not-quite-silence than he could.

It took only a few moments for Luke to find the tracks Carla had left when she headed up the canyon. Her footprints followed the trail markers she had left in August. All other signs of her previous visit had been washed away by rain. Luke walked quickly, fighting the impulse to run, to overtake the girl who had left nothing more of herself in September Canyon than a fragile line of tracks that wouldn’t outlive the next winter storm.

Filled with an anxiety that he neither understood nor could control, Luke scrambled up the narrow tongue of rock and debris that looked out over the canyon. There was no one waiting at the top, no girl with blue-green eyes and a smile that set a man to dreaming of marrying one special woman, having a family with her, watching their children grow to meet the challenges of the beautiful, unflinching land.

"Carla?"

No answer came back but the haunted wind.

Luke looked around quickly for Carla’s tracks but found none. Where the surface wasn’t gravel it was solid rock. He glanced up the canyon, then down, then up again. No one was in sight. He scrambled down the far side of the promontory. There were no rocks piled to mark the way, nothing to indicate which direction Carla had taken. If she had left tracks, the rich sidelight of the descending sun would have made them stand out like flags.

"Damn it, Carla," he muttered, scanning the view impatiently, "you know better than to take off without leaving any markers to – "

The angry words stopped when Luke’s breath came in fast and hard and stayed there. His head snapped around and he looked up canyon again. This time he saw nothing but rock, pinon, sunlight and shadow. Yet there had been something there before, a glimpse of right angles and rectangular shadows that were at odds with his expectations. Nature’s geometry was circular, curve after curve flowing through unimaginable time. Man’s geometry was angular, line after line marching through carefully divided time. He had seen a hint of man, not canyon.